Scrotum Bottles For Sale in Arizona this Weekend
“A lot of times people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”
By Jim Mundorf
Duff Severe, 1919-2004, saddle maker and absolute legend. He spent his life perfecting the craft of rawhide braiding and saddle making. He has won all kinds of awards and has saddles in the Smithsonian but all of that pales in comparison to what he created here. According to the Old West Events Auction website:
The tooled leather title plaque inside the custom wood display case reads: "These bottles are covered with the scrotums of / each of the North American big game animals: / Deer - Caribou - Antelope - Bighorn Sheep / Elk - Moose - Buffalo - Mt. Goat / The braiding work is genuine rawhide; hand-cut, / hand-colored, and hand-braided, requiring / over 600 hours of concentrated hand-crafting." The Severe Brothers cartouche appears on either side of the tooled plaque.
I’m just going to figure that every billionaire in the world will be high tailing it to Mesa Arizona this weekend to bid on these scrotum bottles. Steve Jobs once said, “A lot of times people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” Usually it would be frowned upon to associate that quote with scrotums, but on this glorious occasion he could not have been more right. I never knew these existed and have never once thought to myself, “You know what this bottle needs? A scrotum.” But now that I’ve seen them, I could not want them more.
Could you imagine having a high class dinner party and bringing the wine selections out in these things? You could say to your guests, “Tonight we are serving a 1952 Merlot wrapped in the scrotum of a mountain goat.” Or maybe as the guests arrive and the men stand talking over the latest sporting event, the wife yells from the kitchen, “Honey which scrotum is the Pinot in?” and the answer is yelled back in all it’s masculine glory, “The Buffalo scrotum!” (For the record I rarely host a dinner party, they are never high class, and the only thing I know about wine is how to pour it in my mouth.)
The rawhide braided tops are what turn these scrotums into actual works of art. If you have never seen rawhide braided then you can’t truly appreciate the painstaking amount of time that goes into it. To be able to do work like this would take years of training and practice. Usually you would only find this quality of work on the finest of horse gear. Duff must have realized that anyone could wrap a scrotum around a bottle, but its not just anybody that is going to spend hundreds of hours turning them scrotums into one of a kind masterpieces. According to the auction site these took 600 hours to complete. The only reason I can think of for making them so intricate and spending so many hours on them, is merely for the joy of when anyone asked him, “Whatcha been working on?” he could respond with, “My scrotums.”
You're my boy Duff!
Duff Severe standing in front of the glass case containing his scrotum bottles. If his name and work weren't legendary enough he also looks exactly like the character Blue from the movie Old School.